


Tangled in flames (in buildings that fall)

by Littlesnake



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 00:28:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2902706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlesnake/pseuds/Littlesnake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because Melinda May was the epitome of dedication, relentless in her pursuit of a safer world, that she would burn her soul for it. </p>
<p>(And she did, in Bahrain.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangled in flames (in buildings that fall)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognise.   
> Also, plenty of OCs.

They're all coughing except Richard who was too busy throwing up blood, body convulsing with every retch and Melinda' vision was half obstructed by the sheer amount of smoke and dust in the air.

For a split second, she froze, caught in the oddest desperation that she was dreaming; that she was not about to watch her teammates - her family - get eliminated and fried by lightning one by one, just blindly hoping that this was just some twisted, new simulation programme that the higher authorities had cooked up for them, because she was not prepared for this.

Somewhere to her left a hand gripped her leg and the trance shattered, abrupt as it had come and Melinda was about to kick her assailant hard in the face when the person spoke up.

"We need to get out of here," the coarse voice choked out. James was alive, good old James (but she had trained with him for years, she knew he would, he had to, all of them had to -).

Melinda shook her head, dimly registering that James couldn't see it through the smoke. "Get the civilians."

He disappeared without another word and Melinda squinted her eyes through the remnants of a building repeatedly struck by lightning.

"This is Agent May, does anyone copy?"

Fitch's uncharacteristically tired voice replied, "Four agents hit."

Her lips parted in muted chaos, but she couldn’t find her voice.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

"May. May?”

“Yes sir.”

“Get out alive - "

A gunshot rang out and she wrenched the comm set out of her ear, Fitch's shout resonating in her ears far too sharply.

"Send help," he wheezed between soft grunts and softer whimpers.

Melinda heard the familiar rumbling from above and just screamed before dropping back on the ground blindly, hands over her head, blood pounding so hard she couldn’t hear anything over it, when lightning came down like the wrath of god and sliced everything clean -

Out of the corners of her eyes, a movement stopped and Richard's body was deadly still, in every non-metaphorical way while May’s breathing doubled in rate, as though she could breathe for him and force lungs and life into his burnt and charred body.

(Richard, Richard of all people, he who went from being the stoic, grouchy agent to  being her stoic, grouchy best friend, he couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t be - )

Then Command's voice was in her ear, telling them to abort mission and get out of the building fast, soon, and Richard was still burnt and charred and more still than a dead fish.

Melinda glanced at the agent beside her, the person she was so incredibly familiar with that it was irrational, told herself that a proper burial wasn’t worth dragging dead weight along and ran as best as she could with a stinging wound in her leg and blood streaming down her face, chasing the dwindling sunlight out of the building that was hell -  

She made it to safety a second before the world came crashing down, the sheer energy pulsing around her as she stumbled. Her head snapped back, eyes searching for the building she had just exited but only finding a pile of rubble where it had once stood and a part of her heart felt like it was on fire, strewn across the empty stretch behind her, between safety and certain death, looming empty as the fire snapped and jeered at her.

*

On her worst nights, memories of her academy days with James would be interwoven with the hours she clocked in Afghanistan with Richard and how Fitch was her S.O and was a bitch from day one to the day he recommended her to director Fury to work with him directly in his elite strike team.

She sees James asking if she needed help, sees herself clearing obstacle courses without trouble before turning around to help James with a smirk and a promise to tease him to the end of his days, she sees Richard taking a bullet for her because it was her goddamn birthday and ironically, the only one who remembered was he who was most stressed out over survival and insufficient ammo.

On her worst nights, she wishes she hadn’t ran.

*

Her new handler told her it wasn’t healthy to keep punching things, phrasing it like a casual comment as he tried to prod at her invisible boundaries, watching her with something akin to amusement in his eyes, just much deeper and much sadder. Yet Melinda had always placed sanity over health, though she chose not to mention that to Coulson, just kept her head down and kept going.

She never had the chance to get her men help. After making it out, SHIELD had torn the rubble apart but nothing was left, only charred ashes and concrete blocks falling to dust. There were no bodies, no enemy’s head on a silver platter, just a quiet memorial and a quieter lone wolf. The lightning maniac had vanished off grid, presumably dead.

(But that didn’t revive her team.)

(Nothing could revive her team.)

She ignored the junior agents who stared at her as she made her way to the gym every single day, them, their looks of awe and fear. She ignored them like she ignored her problems and the gaping hole in her heart where her teammates used to live, with their loud laughter and incessant idiocy.

(She would give all of her - her strength, her life, her career - to get her team back once more, but they weren’t coming back and she was already lost.)

*

Three years later SHIELD made her in charge of a welcoming team.

“It’s casual,” he said with a shrug. “You generally don’t even get a casualty count.”

“Swapping guns and blood for better sleep at night?” she shot back.

He grinned. “It’s definitely a perk, yes.”

Melinda rolled her eyes but accepted the mission anyway. She wanted to know what sort of person required an agent credited with dozens of kills and captures to drop by for a meet-and-greet.

The science department, flustered and excited, provided her with pages upon pages of explanations that completely flew over her head with facts and diagrams on cellular biology that reminded her of school entirely too much. She picked out the words ‘lightning’, ‘Bahrain’ and ‘cult’ but pretended to understand anyway. The rest of her team had chosen to just stare at two techs.

"So," Miller said after a half an hour of - what did they even say? - briefing by the techs, "what do we do?"

Fury gave them his usual deadpan, unimpressed glare. “You say hi.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“You shoot him.”

An almost uncomfortable laughter rang around the conference room, fading away as quickly as it had started as the rest of the team turned to took their cues from her. Melinda gave a stiff nod and stood to leave, adamantly avoiding eye contact with Fury.

(Lightning, Melinda had had the worst luck with missions involving lightning, was that why she was chosen?)

*

Then a week later, the Op actually happened and went so drastically wrong to the point that Melinda stopped keeping track how many derailings had happened.

Sitwell, the tech support HQ had assigned them, started to crack a joke, but stopped when Melinda threatened to burn a hole in his skull and they were both quite certain that she was shamelessly literal. Neither said another word as they watched the situation deteriorate, helpless, Sitwell from wherever he was and Melinda from their temporary base of operations, wishing that she hadn’t decided to stay back and monitor the situation.

That same gnawing ugliness of hiding in the safety ate at her, like a fledgling monster feeding itself on her flesh, her mind, her soul, her memories of that forsaken building lingering just beneath the surface of her thoughts like a nagging, sneering, jeering demon, even though rationally she had been the most capable person to coordinate the mission, even though this operation had only been moderately risky, but reason didn’t stop the anger from boiling over, anger at herself, scorching and simmering like spilt lavae.

*

HQ scrambled their back up teams within an hour, but every moment was a moment too long. Phil’s voice was streaming through her laptop and his eyes were begging her to understand.

“Twelve hours, May. Twelve hours and you’ll get your team back.”

Melinda didn’t pause as she checked the knives strapped to her ankle.

“And every minute is the difference between my team in person and my team in body bags,” she replied, all calm and steady as though she planned one to twenty excavation missions on a daily basis. “I’m going in, end of story.”

“And if you don’t come out?”

“That’s why we’ve got a strike team on their way, isn’t it?”

Phil pressed his lips together in his familiar I-don’t-like-your-plan expression, but eventually sighed and wished her good luck, to which she would typically declare that she didn’t need luck.

Her only retort was that luck was just about the least stable of forces on her side.

*

She was halfway through the building when she encountered her main threat.

Their target protected himself with a mysterious group of guards. SHIELD pegged them to be former military, given the efficiency and skillsets that SHIELD had observed.

Five armed men had their weapons trained on her and she was about to launch an offensive, but then Melinda dropped her knife.

Across the room, the man in the middle (“James,” she whispered, almost not believing herself) nodded at her while her heart was beating jarringly fast.

“Take her in,” his gruff voice unchanged over the years.

“James!” she screamed, her voice cracking more out of emotion than exertion.

But he turned and walked away as though he heard nothing. A flash of conflict flickered across the man to his left - Fitch, oh god Fitch - but that was all.

Fitch’s eyes bored into hers, cold, recognising nothing and remembering nothing, and nodded once. “Yes sir,” Fitch said, motioning the others to secure her.

But Fitch would never call James ‘sir’, Fitch was their team leader and two generations their senior, unless -

Brain washed, it dawned upon her, her hands curling up into fists she had never thought would be used against them beyond sparring. All five of them, taken alive and reprogrammed.

(She thought she had left them all dead, but no, she had left them much worse than dead.)

*

She knew their weaknesses but they didn’t remember hers, and Melinda would sooner take down a hostile than play nice when knifes and punches were flying.

Her elbow collided against someone’s nose - she refused to look - as her teeth came down sharp on a hand, stimulating a foreign scream with a familiar voice (too familiar) and her fingers wrapped around the cool metal of a pistol. She swung her arm hard - and accurately - and someone’s blood spurted on her as a body fell with the crunch she knew signalled a broken bone - and someone seized her hand but Melinda just dug her nails in, the gritty, bitchy way she learnt to fight when she was ten, in the rough neighbourhood of drunkards and desolation -

(And for a moment she was back in the alleys fighting for her life, fighting because it was always the one thing she was good as and because they were awful, horrid bullies, fighting against people twice her size, but winning, always winning, because she was quick and cunning and most eighteen year olds don’t treat a middle school girl seriously.)

The four men lay around like odd, twisted grotesque marionette dolls with their tangled limbs, dark red blood staining her vision (her ledger and her life). They were brute and blunt but she was lithe and lethal and none of them had ever taken her down in a spar.

But she had chose not to take any of their lives, just brutally crushed them, not their lives, never their lives.

Melinda swallowed, the scent of blood screaming in her mouth.

“Sitwell. What’s the situation on the systems?”

“I got through their systems so surveillance is down. Target doesn’t know you’re coming and you’ve dropped most of his security force.”

Melinda glanced ahead at the corridor awaiting her and picked out the traces of blood on the walls. “We might need a medic.”

Sitwell snorted. “Yeah, right, might.”

*

Turns out, their target was the same psychotic super powered little friend from three years ago.

*

“There’s a large surge of electricity pulsing through the sky above you, May. We’re detecting weather abnormalities and a potentially disastrous build up of -”

“Get to the goddamn point, Sitwell,” she snapped. She knew something was up. She could see the cracks in the walls, the glass shattering all around her, hear the babbling in her ear and for the first time, Melinda felt an overwhelming urge to just stop and let someone else, for once, settle the problems of the world and humanity and just let her lose control.  

He took a deep breath. “You have to get out of there, May, you don’t have the time.”

And hadn’t she heard that before.

She thought of Fitch lying on the ground, groaning, the absurd shrewdness in his eyes washed out and replaced by a soulless, gaping hole.

“Not yet.”

“The hostages are with the local medic team and going up against the target unarmed is suicide, May.”

“I know. Which is why I’m not.”

Sitwell spluttered in her ear but she turned and ran from extraction point anyway, running, running, feeling the ground shake beneath her, just praying -

Coulson’s voice came over the comm line and when was he even in Bahrain and outright begged her to leave, because even if she started running out now, she was still out of time.

Then chunks of ceiling started raining down on her and lightning came down by her side once more and suddenly she was back in that building three years ago watching every person die and she couldn’t possibly bail out on the same team twice, it’s unethical and absolutely immoral -

Concrete barred her way as the corridor caved in, little flakes of paint and larger slabs of cement crashing down upon her then Coulson’s voice was in her ear again, strong, firm and controlled.

“The energy build up is sufficient to fry Bahrain, May. You’ve got to end this and you need to do it now. Bring the house down on him, or everything goes.”

He kept quiet for a moment, letting his words sink in with the packed punch like his words always did.

"Your call, May."

Her body spasmed and Melinda dimly registered a sound like resembled a sob - her sob - as her hand shook, jabbing down at the comm set as her body manoeuvred itself back to extraction point, blankly, further and further and further away from where her soul lay bloodied and bruised.

(Silent, everything around her was soundless and it was either she bring down this god forsaken building or the whole town dies.)

And May didn't remember what she said, but she did remember watching her morality come crashing down around her like the tattered walls gone up in flames that she was responsible for.

"The pulse is dead. Guy's been eliminated," Sitwell’s  voice crackled over the comm line, distant and mute against the buzz in her ears and there was a sickness in the pit of her stomach and ice in her veins, numbing and scorching simultaneously amidst the sudden quiet that screamed absence of life.

*

When the pained shrieks stopped and all was left was a blurry flame, she looked around and saw endless stretches of carnage.

She stumbled, a mixture of shock and tears messing over her vision and Coulson just placed a hand over her shoulder, soothing and caring and uncaring of the red on her arms and the red in her ledger.

And all was wreckage with nothing left standing across the desolate fields, like her soul, like the burnt canvas of red that was her life.

 

 


End file.
